A Nifty Tool to Call Hell from Heaven

Andreas Löscher
Confused C Programmer

A Nifty Tool to Call Hell from Heaven

The Erlang/OTP system, for better or worse, comes with a native interface that allows execution of C code in Erlang applications in the form of NIFs. However, the translation of C data structures to Erlang ones and vice versa has to be implemented manually. Nifty is an automatic Erlang Native Interface generator that connects Erlang with an existing C library and allows calling its functions. The talk will show how using nifty one can build Erlang modules from regular C header files automatically. If time permits we will also present how we are using nifty in conjunction with PropEr to property-based test C code bases and talk about our experiences so far.

About Andreas

Andreas Löscher got his Diploma degree in Computer science from the University of Technology in Chemnitz. He is now studying towards a PhD degree at Uppsala University, where he is researching how distributed systems can be tested.